The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime

Neil Hertz's long-awaited volume of essays explores the notion of the sublime in literary and psychoanalytic texts from Longinus to Freud. The End of the Line focuses on "authorial surrogates" -figures who appear in literature, philosophy, or psychoanalysis as emblems of activity of writing that has produced the work. George Eliot's Mr. Casaubon or a mangy dog in a novel by Flaubert emerge in Hertz's readings as doubles or scapegoats; through masterful analyses Hertz locates the pressures that produce these surrogates -pressures, he shows, that are crucial to the creation of great art. Hertz's work has long been famous for its extraordinary range as well as its uncompromising rigor. Although its subject is blockage, repression, and surrogates, The End of the Line is a brilliant and complete critical performance.